Thymesia is a Souls-like that sees you play as Corvus, a reincarnated warrior with amnesia. Although uncertain of your standing on the earth, you might be guided by a spectral visage that duties you with uncovering the secrets and techniques of “Vile Blood” and “Pure Blood”.
Trappings of Souls titles are aplenty, with issues like lanterns serving as bonfires, a spectral house base the place you improve your character, and labyrinthine stage design suffering from shortcuts. The 4 ranges are fairly small, and every successive one will get smaller. Every space has facet quests that add a little bit of extra content material, although. Visually, the environments enormously differ from each other, however do borrow closely from the FromSoftware playbook; a toxic forest, blood-soaked caverns, and an deserted village. The degrees add their very own visible twists: the forest encompasses a travelling circus, and also you attain the bloody caverns via a collection of arboretums, however nothing feels wholly unique.
Gameplay gives a mixture of hack and slash fight with the meticulous assault and dodge schema you’d count on from Darkish Souls, and that is problematic. A fight system like this requires a level of precision that Thymesia would not have. Inputs fail to register usually, daggers used to counter vital strikes usually tend to undergo enemies than hit, and plenty of enemy combos final lengthy sufficient that dodging is pointless.
All these flaws are additional amplified throughout bosses, the place you’ve got a better want for precision that simply is not there. Nevertheless, should you get previous the primary boss, it needs to be clean crusing. The problem is front-loaded, and as you stage up and unlock perks, the problem would not scale with you a lot, making the again half of the sport largely trivial.
Minute-to-minute fight in opposition to common enemies is fairly enjoyable, thanks largely to the sport’s greatest thought: reaving. You employ a cost assault to steal particular strikes from enemies and it is an excellent system that is well-implemented. It slots into the stream of fight nicely, and chaining combos is satisfying, and extra importantly, enjoyable. If extra of the sport had the diploma of polish that reaving does, the sport may have been one thing particular.
The tip result’s a small-scale recreation with lofty aspirations that miss the mark. Stealing specials is nice, however every thing surrounding that’s unimpressive.